Additional OTOY Octane details?

Forgot to ask @OTOY, is their going to be student discounts on the Octane to Unity plugin subscription/OctaneVR subscription?

Thanks!!!

 

I'm still a little confused about the subscription aspect of this. Sorry for being a pest with all my questions but I just want to make absolutely clear I understand this so I don't end up being massively disappointed. The subscription is specifically for people who want to use Octane's cloud services and other perks but Octane's base functionalities will still be free through Unity for anyone to download, correct?

 

@BJPen That is correct. (See OTOY's reply on post #94 & #99.)

 

Good news everyone:

https://twitter.com/OTOY/status/892447247488630785

 

That's AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Another great thing is you can export ORBX!!!!

Everyone coming to this thread from Google: https://unity.otoy.com/

Cheers!
NuclearRasberry

 

Lets be clear about something now so there is not too long for wrong expectations to form. As best I understand, the light baking stuff that will allow octane-rendered stuff to be used for lightmap textures will not be free.

Taken from this page:

https://unity.otoy.com/roadmap/

I dont have a problem with this plan at all myself, but felt the need to share this info since there has already been a lot of talk about 'octane for unity is free' but there is devil in the detail.

 

I have two different video cards in my system because I'm learning to render with Blender Cycles. As you might know, is OK to render with different cards, the performance boost will be there despite the difference. Will it be the same with Octane for Unity? The cards are GTX 970 and GTX 1070. Thanks for reading me!

 

Hi there,

Right now, Octane only works in the editor, and not in a build, isn't that?

Also, the limitations in supported hardware makes it not so useful for game devs. Is there any plan to improve this?

You have the chance to make Unity graphics on par with Unreal, don't miss it.

 

Unless I've got my facts all wrong there is absolutely no point in this version working in a build because it would offer no features at all. Because right now it just lets you render unity scenes to an image or sequence of images. Thats something you'd want to do in the editor, not in a build.

When they make a version that supports lightmapping, this will still only need to work in the editor to be useful. You will render lightmaps in the editor using octane, and then unity will use those lightmaps like it already uses lightmaps created by other means, still no need for octane to do any stuff at runtime/in builds (assumption).

When they bring their other exciting technologies to the table, thats when build support will matter, and when any nvidia-only limitation will really sting. Because it will effect whether the hardware your customers have is supported by your game, as opposed to the situation now where the hardware limitation only matters for machines running the unity editor, it doesnt affect the end users of the game.

 

Correct - you only need Octane in Unity Editor for the first 3 layers that touch game mode:

1) rendering to VR video, image formats (e.g. Carmack res stereo cube maps)
2) baking GI (which is coming up next)
3) baking to light field (which don't use Octane for playback)

If you actually want Octane to be used for rendering inside your Unity app, we will have a mode down the line for tools and world light mapping etc, but it will probably be pulled into your game mode package differently than what is exposed for Editor

The final layer we want to reach down the line is to is having something like ~Octane+Brigade+AI denoising handle real time path tracing in game mode, with no need to bake anything. In that case, the OR would have to be loaded inside the Unity game package, but we might do this outside of the plug-in level.

 

That's Awesome @OTOY!!!

Cheers!!
NuclearRasberry

 

Well, I was thinking more in Octane as realtime render engine, not as 'baking tool'.

Thanks for the explanation

 

Out if curiosity, is there a ETA on when Octane will move out of preview?

Cheers!!
NuclearRasberry

 

You'll have to wait for Brigade.

 

Brigade will be in Octane 4 (or more precisely, merged with Octane)

 

In the coming years will Octane be able to work in most hardware (with Brigade having that method on making it 50x the speed on most computers.)?

Thanks!!
NuclearRasberry

 

Any ETA?

 

In the Octane für Unity-Documentation it says that only Unity-Standard shaders are currently supported. When will support for custom shaders become available. Could custom shaders already be supported if they met certain requirements? In our projects we are using layered materials for lacquers.
​

 

Maybe I misunderstand here, but there is quite the need for a empowering the end user with the ability to pull out a (higher quality) render, more so than a need to render in editor.

For instance, our clients often wish to "screencap" from the software to use in presentations etc.
So a runtime render tool would be quite a feature, for applications outside of games.

 

OK dont get me wrong, I love niche uses. I'm sorry to even label that scenario as a niche, but given how long renders can still take even when GPU accelerated, the fact its currently nvidia only, coupled with all the other stuff OTOY have filling up their roadmap for I assume some years to come, it's hard for me to think of this as anything other than a niche use.

 

Also thinking about it further, I bet such a scenario would cause a licensing dilemma for OTOY. I kind of doubt they'd want their unity users to be able to create & distribute as many apps as they want which have octane rendering capabilities built in without some additional cost, given the prices everyone on every other platform has to pay to use a single instance of octane renderer.

An extreme example of this, to illustrate the point, is that if I had runtime octane render output capabilities, I could make a unity app that ran on a whole farm of machines and do some distributed rendering without having to pay per seat. I just dont see this happening.

 

Well, I think unity usage outside of games is less niche that one might think, actually a lot less.

The licensing could definitely be a problem for a runtime render, but it's the only scenario that I can think of where a render for unity would not be even more a niche, save from baking lightmaps.

I'm pretty sure the whole archviz industry would also be onboard with a "KeyShot" thing going on for the end user as well.

 

True, that makes sense that if it were to be in a "Per Seat" method, it wouldn't be possible. Maybe that's where the cloud comes in?

Cheers!!
NuclearRasberry

 

I agree, but when it comes to specific features that support that stuff, then I think we can easily be heading into niche territory.

My attitude would probably be a bit different on this one if OTOY was already at a stage with Unity where all the more 'mainstream' stuff was done already, but it isnt. It doesnt even work in play mode inside the editor yet.

 

I heard that Octane Lightmapper will be available early next month.I hope that the baking speed will increase with GPU baking.
Also, if this lightmapper does not have a memory usage problem, we can hope that there will be a revolution in tree rendering using unity

Progressive lightmapper needs +64gb memory to bake some tree models with low resolution

 

Isn't Octane unbiased, meaning there is no limit to memory or time, it will just keep going and updating, unless you define a "stop point" beforehand.

Sorry, I haven't tried it for unity yet, and it's been such a long time since I tested it.

 

Memory limitation only happens when showing the progressive lightmaps preview. (stored in system RAM for the fast preview)
I hope that Octane will bake the scene like Beast lightmapper with 500mb memory usage during bake time

 

Baking (both ORBX->FBX->Unity mesh, Unity scene->Octane) is the focus of the nearly done 3.07 update of Octane core. Game mode will be working as well, many improvements to speed and Unity material capability. 3.08 is nearly feature complete and has fully programmable OSL shaders, which gives us the tools we need to handle automatic Unity shader conversion to Octane without baking to texture. We're also working on terrain conversion and particles in that release.

 

We absolutely want to see new tools and services built on top of Unity+Octane outside of editor (especially with Octane 4).

Adding support for this is in fact on our mid-term roadmap (after OSL, baking and other editor integration work is finished).

 

For games when Brigade comes in (Octane 4), will you need a beefy computer to run it? Or will it be able to handle different types of computers?

Cheers!
NuclearRasberry

 

One easy but powerful use of Octane at game runtime is taking rendered games screenshots.

I believe sharing in game screenshots could boost user interest and help game viral marketing

for example, when 24 terrain demo was released from Terrain composer dev that many of us just enjoyed walking the scenery and publish screenshots...

thanks !

Fred

 

I understand it’s been a while since anybody posted in this thread. @OTOY any eta on the light stack/light mapper?

Cheers!
NukeRasberry

 

Hi,

Are you planning to release an OSX installer for Unity?

 

Ask from otoy forums to get faster respond
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=129&sid=219364cb15733e51fd6828451650ea1f

 

Thanks man!!! I completely forgot about their forums!!

Cheers!
NukeRasberry

 

Is it possible to use Otoy plugin to bake lightmaps at Unity scenes instead of Unity's lighting component?

 

hi
excuse me , I have a problem within install octane in UNITY ... !
when i click " install " in Octane tab and console of unity show me that error :
;;
WebException: The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error.
System.Net.HttpWebRequest.CheckFinalStatus (System.Net.WebAsyncResult result)
System.Net.HttpWebRequest.SetResponseData (System.Net.WebConnectionData data)

 

Not yet
Will be available soon

 

That is great to hear. Unity's new lighting component sometimes can be a pain, hope Otoy will come out with a better alternative.

When is the expected release date?

 

Progressive Lightmapper quality is better than all other lightmappers, but needs high amount of the Memory (RAM) and long cpu bake time.
Octane renderer used GPUs for baking, so it's very fast

Octane release date :
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=129&t=62893&e=0

I already heard that Octane Lightmapper will be available early next month (august). But they needs more time to fix bugs

 

Do you mean Unity's Progressive Lightmapper? Yes it is fine in the concept but I don't understand why baking needs to create individual lightmaps for each static objects? It was better to use previous baking with atlas since it generated lower amount of data to store. I hope Otoy will also consider the space limitation- I know that is contra to quality- for mobile games.

 

You can use lower resolution to get less lightmap files

 

I use lower resolution (128) but still generates individual files, but maybe I am doing something wrong at the configuration.

This is my setup:

 

Increase "Lightmap Size", decrease "Lightmap Resolution"

 

Your resolution is 30
You must use less than 10 for mobile games

 

Alright, thank you very much!

 

Thank you

 

Set terrain lightmap scale to 1 to fix terrain lightmap quality in low resolution

 

Did that, after all configurations lightmap size decreased, thanks again.

 

Good interview at unite austin today.